ISLAMABAD: Members of a Senate’s special committee on Tuesday took notice of the absence of the PIA chairman and other senior officials in a meeting called for a briefing on the performance of the national flag carrier.

They expressed dissatisfaction over the briefing given by some PIA officials.

PML-N’s Mushahidullah Khan, the convener of the 18-member Senate Special Committee on the Performance of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), reprimanded the PIA management for what he called taking the committee’s proceedings lightly. He said “such an irresponsible attitude will not be tolerated in future”.

Rejecting the briefing, the committee comprising a number of political heavyweights has directed the PIA chairman to appear before it next month to give a comprehensive briefing on every department of the airline to the satisfaction of the members.

The members of the committee belonging to the opposition PPP, Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and the PML-Q, said that in the previous meeting they had put a number of specific questions before the PIA management and asked it to include them in the briefing, but they regretted that they had not got any reply on those questions.

Reading out the minutes of the previous meeting, Mushahidullah Khan said that the committee had called for a comprehensive briefing on all departments, including flight operations, marketing and passenger handling. However, he said, the members had found nothing new in the briefing. He said the committee was giving another opportunity and more time to PIA officials to come up with a comprehensive briefing.

PPP’s Saeed Ghani was of the view that most of the information provided by PIA officials during the briefing was already available on the website.

Another PPP member, Sherry Rehman, termed the briefing “a total disappointment” and questioned the absence of senior officials of the PIA. “Why are they missing?” she asked.

“The level of information given to this special committee after three weeks of preparation is so flimsy that it looks as if opacity and non-transparency are a policy. No point holding such meetings at taxpayer expense, if answers are not given,” she added.

The PPP senator said that she had asked for a lot of contractual material and business plans in good faith “but I am beginning to doubt the capacity and commitment of those in charge to take any process forward with democratic systems”.

“If bulldozing bills is going to become the norm, our fledgling democracy will go back into the dark days of the 1990s, which will be unfortunate for Pakistan,” she said in her apparent reference to the government’s move to get the controversial PIA bill converting the airline into a company limited passed by the National Assembly amidst opposition’s protest and boycott.

Kamil Ali Agha of PML-Q said that the thrust of the briefing was that the PIA had started improving on all fronts. He questioned the logic behind the policy of privatising the PIA, if things had started improving in the airline.

Talking to Dawn after the committee’s meeting, Saeed Ghani said the opposition had been told that the PIA was presently handling only 24 per cent of the international passengers from the country whereas its share in the domestic passengers was 42 per cent.

Moreover, he said, foreign airlines were operating 101 weekly flights in a week in 2011 and the number had now increased to 390 flights per week.

Mr Ghani said the PPP had always been accused of making heavy recruitments in PIA whereas the official data presented to them showed that the number of employees had actually decreased during the PPP’s tenure. He said there were 18,016 employees in the PIA when the PPP took over the government in 2008 and it reduced to 16,563 in 2013. At present, there are 14,847 employees in the PIA.

He said it was true that the employees to aircraft ration was higher in PIA as compared to other airlines, but the “employee cost per available seat per kilometre (ASK)” was only 1 US cent which was very low as compared to other international companies.

The special committee of the Senate had been formed by Chairman Raza Rabbani on a motion that had been moved by Azam Swati of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf seeking a discussion on the performance of PIA.

Published in Dawn, January 27th, 2016

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